Are We There Yet? (4 page)

Danny thinks about this for a moment. (If Elijah were to look over, he would notice his brother hasn't turned the page in
the past ten minutes.) As Elijah and this stranger discuss the ending of
Roman Holiday
and how it makes them feel (sad, happy), Danny wonders whether it's true that
everyone
, at heart, likes Audrey Hepburn. So the similarity isn't that strange at all. It's as commonplace as the desire to eat when hungry. It doesn't link the two brothers any more than that.

That
is something Danny can believe.

“So this is your brother?” Penelope whispers, pointing over Elijah's shoulder. He doesn't know why she is whispering. Then he turns and sees that Danny has fallen asleep on his tray table, the edge of his shoulder spotlighted by the overhead lamp.

“Do you think he needs a pillow?” Elijah asks.

“No. He'll be all right.”

Elijah reaches over the armrest and presses the lightbulb button. Then he turns back to Penelope and asks her if she has any brothers or sisters. She has three sisters, one of whom is getting married in a matter of months.

“She's older than me, thank God,” Penelope says with a sigh. “I have to wear this hideous dress. I told her—I said,
‘This dress is hideous.’
Her dress is gorgeous, by the way. Bridesmaids only exist to make the brides look good. I don't care what anyone says. It's not an honor. It's a mockery.

“Her dress has a train. When I saw it, I just started to cry. Not because I'm not the one who's getting married. I can handle that. But to see my sister in a white satin train—it was like we were playing dress-up again. She'd always let my mother's dresses trail behind her. Of course, I'd jump on them and try to trip her up. And I was always the one who got in trouble for the footprints— it didn't matter that the bottom was also covered with dust. Anyway—seeing her at the fitting, it struck me that I can't jump on her dress anymore. I can't pull it over her head and show her underwear to the congregation. I can't even tell her that it isn't hers, that she has to put it back in the closet before our mother comes home. No, it's hers. And it's
her
.”

Penelope shakes her head.

Boys never dress up as grooms
, Elijah thinks.
They never practice their own weddings like girls do
. But there are other kinds of pairs. He remembers Batman and Robin. Luke and Han. Frodo and Aragorn. Cowboy and Indian.

There was only a year or two for those games, before Danny started dressing up in a different way. This time, the character he was playing was the cooler version of himself, shopping at the mall for the perfect costume, trying to blend in and stand out at the same time. It was never explained to Elijah, and he wasn't old enough to figure it out. All he knew was that one day his brother stopped wanting to be a superhero, stopped wanting to save their backyard world. Elijah stopped dressing up then, too. He retreated to the realm of his room, to his drawings, to his stuffed animals.

It wasn't the same.

Sisters dress up to rehearse for what will really happen to them. But brothers, Elijah realizes, are never rehearsing that way. They rehearse their own illusions, until reality takes a turn and they are asked to rehearse for other things. You go to school. You graduate. You sell snack cakes. You hang up your cape and put on a suit.

Danny wakes up into the strange timeless nighttime of air travel. The window shades are drawn. The flight attendants float down the aisle like guardian angels. The guidebook has fallen at his feet. A woman is talking.

“…And then, it was the strangest thing, I walk into the room and
there's Courtney Love.
Have I told you this? No? Good. So I can't believe it. Now, this is after she was the lead singer of—what was it called?—Hole. Don't think I'm
that
old. I'm not that old. So it's after Hole, and I walk into the room, and there she is. I can't believe it. So I walk over to her and offer her a joint. Real cool. I can tell that my boyfriend's real impressed at how smooth I am. And she says yes.
But neither of us has a match.
I'm fumbling around, pulling the rolling papers and the dope out of my pockets, and I can't find a light! So my boyfriend just leans over, Courtney looks up at him, and all smooth, he lights her up. I'm still there fumbling. She says thanks to him, offers him a puff, and when he's done he
doesn't even offer it to me.
Because now they're talking and
sharing
and it's like I'm not even there. I say his name, and he just gives me one of those side smiles. I can't believe it. Some other guys join the conversation and I'm out of the circle. And I'm sure Courtney has seen me. But does she say anything? No. Not a word. My boyfriend's treating her like the Pope and my head's all screwed up, so I just say real loud, ‘Well, why don't you just kiss her ring! ’ Everyone stares at me. Like, it makes perfect sense to me, but I'm the only person in the room with the context. I have to get out of there. Right away. My boyfriend's staring at me like I just called his
mother a whore. And everyone else thinks I'm insulting Her Highness Courtney Love. So I run out of the room. But I'm not looking where I'm going—I crash into this guy in the door-way—
and that's how I met Billy Corgan.
”

It's the woman next to Elijah. Danny is paralyzed by her talking.

“No way!” Elijah exhales in admiration.

“Uh-huh.”

Danny tries to fall back to sleep. He can't believe they're still awake.

Penelope sleeps soundly on Elijah's shoulder. Which is to say, soundlessly. He doesn't mind, even though it makes his arm sore.
Pins and needles
, Elijah thinks, and then he figures that having an arm full of pins and needles would hurt a hell of a lot more than this.

Danny stirs on the other side of him, waking up and turning to Elijah, his eyes unaccustomed to the simulated day. He registers Penelope on Elijah's shoulder and smiles groggily.
It's not like that
, Elijah wants to tell his brother. But he doesn't want to wake Penelope up.

It's like comfort, Elijah figures. Being a comfort is itself pretty comforting. Having someone find a place on your shoulder and be able to rest. Not seeing her face, but picturing it from her breath. Like a baby sleeping. Feeling her breath so slightly on his arm. Breathing in time. Comfort.

The quiet times are the ones to hold on to. In the quiet times, Elijah can think of other quiet times. Staring at the ceiling with Cal. Driving home from a concert, the road silent, the music in his head. Sharing a smile—for a moment—with a beautiful stranger passing in a car.

Beside Elijah, Danny shifts in his seat and signals to the flight attendant for another Diet Coke.

Danny would never let a stranger sleep on his shoulder
, Elijah thinks.
Danny would be afraid of the germs.

He closes his eyes and tries to drift off.

Amazing. Danny thinks it's amazing to be moving so fast without feeling movement. To be sitting in an airplane, traveling as fast as he's ever traveled, and still it feels like he's in a car, steadier than a train, not even as fast as sliding down a slide.
How can this be?
Danny wonders. He wants to ask someone. But who can he ask? Elijah, even if he were awake? The girl on Elijah's shoulder? (Isn't she a little old for him?) The pilot? No one. There's no one to tell him how it can feel so slow to go so fast.

The phone is embedded above the fold-down tray. He could make a collect call from above the Atlantic Ocean. He could slip the corporate card into the proper slot and dial any area code around the world. He does it—slips in the card—just to see what the dials are like. Thinking,
Wouldn't it be funny to slip your credit card into the slot, ten thousand miles in the air, and find a rotary phone?
But no—just the usual buttons. He can pretend it's home. Just a local call.

He pauses before dialing. He pauses too long. He pauses long enough to realize that no one comes instantly to mind. He doesn't have anyone instant. He doesn't have anyone worth a twenty-dollar-a-minute call.

Quietly, Danny places the phone back in its receiver. He presses a little too hard, and the woman in front of him rustles in her sleep. Danny looks at Elijah. He looks at Elijah's eyelids and tries to tell whether he's awake. He used to do that all the time when they were kids. Elijah would be faking sleep—he didn't want to leave the car, he didn't want to go to school—and
Danny would catch the small, betraying twitches. He would try to point them out to his mom, and Elijah would mysteriously pop out of sleep before Danny could finish his sentence. Their mom would shake her head, more annoyed with Danny's tattling than with Elijah's fakery. Or so it seemed to Danny. Back then, and still.

Now Danny concentrates—staring into his brother's closed eyes. Waiting for one eye to open, to see if anyone's looking. Waiting for a telltale giggle of breath, or the twitch of an itching finger. Instead, he observes Elijah and the woman both breathing to the same silent measure. Crescendo. Diminuendo. Rise. Fall. Speed and slowness.